The present invention relates to the removal and storage of in-core instrumentation cabling during the refueling of a nuclear reactor. Various aspects of nuclear-reactor performance must be monitored by instrumentation that is located in the core itself. Due to the highly hostile environment of the core and the rather long refueling intervals, it can be expected that some of the instrumentations will have failed by the time a refueling is performed. In order to replace this instrumentation and to prevent as many future failures as possible, it is typical to replace much of the in-core instrumentation, both good and bad, during the refueling process. As is the case in many operations performed on nuclear reactors, the radiation environment significantly complicates the procedure, and the removal and storage of the instrumentation and its associated cabling must be performed remotely under water because water is used as a radiation shield. It is not enough that remote equipment is used to remove the instrumentation and cabling from the radioactive core; due to its exposure to radiation in the core, the instrumentation and cabling are themselves radioactive, so they cannot be handled directly by reactor personnel even after removal from the core. The cabling must be delivered to containers, the containers must be stored, and all this must be done under water and remote from human beings.
In the case of instrumentation cabling, this remote handling represents certain problems of time and expense. Among these is that, since it can be expected that the cabling will have assumed rather irregular shapes, only a few lengths of the cabling may fit in a given container. This is undesirable, of course, because storage area for radioactive material is always at a premium.